India’s rising forest cover is good news for Copenhagen.
The latest State of the Forests Report has both good and bad news to offer. There has been a steady expansion of forests, by around an average 0.3 million hectares a year between 1997 and 2007. Between 2005 and 2007, an additional 728,000 hectares were brought under forests to increase the total forest and tree cover to 78.37 mn hectares — that’s around 23.8 per cent of the country’s geographical area. If you exclude the very high altitude areas (more than 4,000 metres above sea level) where trees cannot grow, the figure rises to 25.3 per cent. Given how some other rapidly developing countries, such as Brazil and Indonesia, are fast losing their forest cover as they attempt to sustain higher rates of economic growth, this is creditable. Of course, it does not compare favourably with China which, going by the reported numbers, is adding nearly 4 million hectares to its forest cover annually, even while continuing its impressive economic growth.
On the downside, however, the report says that while the area under dense forests is expanding, about 936,000 hectares of moderately dense forests have actually degraded. This reflects poorly on the maintenance of the health of existing forests. Equally worrisome is the revelation that there is a spurt in the ecologically ruinous practice of shifting cultivation (moving to new areas for growing crops once the productivity of existing lands drops) followed by nomadic tribes in the north-eastern hilly states of Arunachal Pradesh and Nagaland. This gets reflected in the shrinking of green cover in these states while most other hilly states in the north-east and northern Himalayas are doing appreciably well, not just when it comes to guarding the forests but also in terms of expanding them further. Interestingly, albeit surprisingly, the report shows that there has been a considerable expansion in the forest canopy in districts of states like Orissa, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh that are mostly populated by tribals and are affected by Naxalism — even those tribal areas not affected by Naxalism have done well in forest expansion. It is tempting to see this as evidence that, contrary to what the environmentalists argued at the time, implementation of the Forest Rights Act — which grants forest-dwelling tribals the right over the forest lands they have been living on — has not hurt the forests. Such an interpretation, however, would be hasty, since the Act came into force only recently and, in any case, very few states have started distributing land rights to forest dwellers. It will be a few years before the real impact of the Forest Rights Act can be seen.
The report has great significance in terms of the ongoing climate change talks, since India can now forcefully argue that developing countries expanding their forest cover should be rewarded — so far negotiations have tended to favour rewarding reduction in deforestation and not increases in forest cover. Forests act as sinks for sequestered carbon and the report estimates that India’s forests and trees capture about 11 per cent of its harmful gas emissions at 1994 levels. This is tantamount to offsetting the entire emissions from the energy consumed in the residential and transport sectors. These conclusions will come in handy for the Indian negotiators at Copenhagen.